Actress Katey Sagal was among the terrified travellers trapped in Los Angeles International Airport (Lax) for hours last week (01Nov13) after a gunman opened fire in her terminal.

Authorities shut down the building and grounded hundreds of flights on Friday after Paul Anthony Ciancia, 23, allegedly shot and killed a Transport Security Administration (Tsa) official at a Terminal 3 checkpoint, and injured several others.

Actor James Franco and singer Nick Jonas used their Twitter.com accounts as the drama unfolded to reveal that they had been left stranded on flights halted by the emergency, and now the Sons of Anarchy star has opened up about her horrifying experiences in the terminal itself.

She tells U.S. talk show host Katie Couric, "I was there. I was in Terminal 3, I was in the lockdown area for about six hours. It was frightening, it was absolutely frightening to me."

The real-life incident has prompted Sagal to call on Tv writers to continue tackling the issue of gun control in America onscreen in a bid to encourage further discussion about how to crack down on shooting crimes - just like her husband, Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter, did with the show's recent season six premiere, which featured a storyline about a boy who opens fire in a school.

She says, "In terms of the television show, the fact is that people should be continuing that conversation.

"My husband, who wrote that episode, he felt that it was a show about a club that runs guns, that's what they do and the lead character is a guy with a couple of kids so it would make sense that that kind of thing would happen. And I think that in his mind it continued the conversation, which, whether it upsets you or... I mean, it's a horrible thing to have to acknowledge, but it's going on and we need to keep talking about it."

The controversial Sons of Anarchy episode aired in America in September (13), less than a year after the nation was rocked by the Sandy Hook school massacre last December (12), when 20 young children and six adults were murdered. The tragedy was the latest school shooting to hit headlines and has prompted fevered discussion about the need for tighter gun control laws.